All tagged collaboration
A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations by Matt K. Parker is a curious book. It describes a vastly different way of working in organizations that enables significantly better outcomes - an exciting scenario. At the same time some of the stories and prescriptions made me either disappointed in my own ways of working or think that there is a deep canyon between my current ways of working and this radical new enterprise.
Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby’s new book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams is a fairly quick read, loaded with guidance and recommendations for teams that aren’t co-located apply the Agile Software Development principles. They even carve out specific instances of the principles as applied to distributed agile teams.
“When Your Team’s Path Forward Isn’t Clear, Carve It” by Adam Kahane takes the idea of “carving” a solution through its paces. I like this way of framing the approach, even if the blog post doesn’t provide specifics (leave that for his book).
Henry Camp gave another interesting talk on "Gaining a Competitive Edge through Sufficiency - 10 Steps to Breakthrough Results". His focus this time was on the concepts from The Choice, which describes the necessary conditions for a successful life: Lots of chances, Toughness/willingness to recover from mistakes, and the Ability to collaborate with others.
Trust has always come up for me in knowledge management conversations, but as this blog from Social in silico post discusses, it is really the center of being able to work together successfully.
Breakthrough Project Management from Ian Heptinstall and Robert Bolton is a brief guide to getting significantly improved project performance through combining two management approaches: One is Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and the other is collaborative contracting. For me the material on CCPM is a confirmation of what I have been doing for many years. And the material on Project Alliancing is new, and yet it rings bells for ensuring successful projects of any type.
I see a lot of projects within business support organizations that look like "implement this tool." And then the organization is surprised when the project takes much longer than expected and the tool doesn't get used to the extent expected.
An interesting talk from AI researcher Kenneth Stanley on his counter-intuitive discovery/realization that formal goals/objectives can block creativity.
The recommendation? Give it a whirl - try something more focused on the task at hand. And if it doesn't work, email will always be there, like an old habit that you can't break.
Mike Gilronan, a Boston local knowledge management friend, has a nice piece on collaboration in the Boston Business Journal, "Five ways to improve collaboration among remote teams."
Collaboration is important to buisness, but it isn't the only thing. And it can't be forced by merely rearranging the deck chairs. Peter Vander Auwera gives me incentive to think about these things.
"We've just killed the buzzword of collaboration" is how Manager Tools close their recent podcast on the topic.
Thomas Friedman has noticed some differences in the way people think about collaboration and pulls on the dictionary for some assistance.
Collaboration is all around us. But so too is active disengagement of people we might expect would want to collaborate. Tom Graves provides some thoughts about this through the metaphor of a kids' train set.
If you hear someone say that their organization is great at collaboration, what behaviors do you expect to see? If they say they are struggling with collaboration, what behaviors are missing? What is happening instead? And then there is that last question - maybe this should be first - why is collaboration important to you?
Tuesday LSSC opened with a fun, story-filled keynote from Gregory Howell of the Lean Construction Institute. I think most of the audience could have listened to him for another hour. I loved his quote, "Real collaboration happens when we agree to move money across borders."
A couple of articles have me thinking and wondering why we still convert "collaboration" or "social business" into things they are not. The problem - as always - is that people are confusing the tools for the behavior. The behavior we want to see is people working together to get things done ("collaboration").
Christopher Avery's "Teamwork is an Individual Skill" may be ten years old, but it is a great resource. The short summary: I am responsible for the success of any venture in which I choose to participate